BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Camus as a Principled Rebel Among Poseurs

By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

Published: December 19, 1997

Of all the major French literary figures of the 1950's and 1960's, the ''hommes engages'' who combined books with political activism, Albert Camus has perhaps best stood the test of time. His friend and later bitter rival Jean-Paul Sartre seems, in retrospect, a trendy poseur discredited by his abject failure to repudiate left-wing totalitarianism. And while Simone de Beauvoir is remembered for her pioneering feminism, her novels have been largely forgotten, especially outside of France. It seems a fair bet that Camus, too, is less than widely read these days; and yet he endures, or he should, for two reasons.

First, his major works of fiction, especially ''The Stranger'' and ''The Plague,'' retain the moral immediacy that made them celebrated when they were first published half a century ago, and so do the philosophical books, ''The Myth of Sisyphus'' and ''The Rebel,'' that accompanied them. Equally important, Camus, especially in his willingness to denounce the atrocities of Stalin and the third-world dictators embraced by the romantic left, demonstrated a political clearheadedness lamentably rare among his literary peers.

''Camus saved the honor of intellectuals who were caught up in a drift toward totalitarianism,'' writes Olivier Todd in ''Albert Camus: A Life,'' his new biography of the writer, translated and abridged from the French by Benjamin Ivry. In contrast to the more crowd-pleasing stalwarts of the French literary elite, Mr. Todd persuasively declares, ''Camus refused politics without morality.''

Mr. Todd's is the latest of many biographies of Camus. Earlier books, especially the huge, pioneering work by Herbert R. Lottman and the later, less reverential biography by Patrick McCarthy, may be more accessible to Americans than Mr. Todd's, which adds detail but does not much alter the overall view. Mr. Todd's book, nonetheless, is brisk and detailed, and the author has made a concerted effort to understand Camus's writings in light of his life.

Mr. Todd, a well-known Parisian magazine journalist and the author of numerous books, portrays Camus as an admirable, brave, tortured and complex figure, a fighter against lifelong tuberculosis but also an irrepressible Don Juan unwilling to put up the slightest resistance to amorous adventure, despite the pain it caused his long-suffering wife. He was also a man so imbued with a sense of his own moral indispensability that, in the apt phrase of Sartre (who seems badly placed to make such judgments), he seemed to carry a portable pedestal around with him wherever he went.

Mr. Todd's approach is to lay out the facts with a minimum of interpretation, adhering to a strict chronological narrative, beginning with Camus's birth in Algiers in 1913 and ending with his death in an automobile accident in 1960 when he was 46. Mr. Todd's minimalist commentary allows readers to draw their own themes, but surely among the most pronounced is Camus's status as a perpetual outsider, a Frenchman from Algeria, a chronically sick man among the healthy, a man of integrity who dwelled in a dishonest intellectual milieu self-deluding in its devotion to revolutionary fads.

After the appearance of ''The Rebel,'' which Mr. Todd proclaims ''a pioneering attack on Stalinist communism,'' one that made its author ''the only widely known French writer coming from the left wing to take such decisive positions,'' Camus declined to eat in some of his favorite restaurants so as not to run into his adversary, Sartre. Though a member of the Resistance during World War II, Camus opposed the death penalty for collaborators. When, in the mid-1950's, the Algerian National Liberation Front began its campaign of terror, Camus was almost alone among the famous French writers in not supporting immediate independence. His origins in the white working class of Algiers led him to understand that there were two very separate populations whose interests needed to be accommodated in a just solution, the Muslims and the non-Muslims.

Mr. Todd quotes liberally from Camus's writings, especially from his notebooks and his letters, reminding us of his subject's aphoristic lucidity. ''I only know one thing, my mystical soul is burning to give itself with enthusiasm, faith, and fervor,'' he wrote when still a 20-year-old student, and then: ''I am too much in love with my lies and hypocrisies not to confess them fervently.'' An early and clairvoyant opponent of French collaboration with the German occupiers of 1940, he declared: ''Now the only moral value is courage, which is useful here for judging the puppets and chatterboxes who pretend to speak in the name of the people.'' A few years later, disgusted with the pro-Soviet, anti-American trendiness of French intellectual life, he declared: ''It is better to be wrong by killing no one than to be right with mass graves. . . . The world is in misery and already inquisitors are seated in ministerial armchairs.''

Among the most fascinating episodes detailed by Mr. Todd are Camus's activities as a Resistance journalist during the German occupation, his battle with Sartre and company in the early 1950's and his unhappy struggles with the Algerian question a few years later. Along the way were two unhappy marriages.

And there are the writings and the events, often chronicled in diaries and letters, beginning with ''The Stranger,'' which gave Camus immediate fame in 1942, to the posthumously published ''The First Man.''

''For the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe,'' the condemned Meursault says in ''The Stranger,'' giving expression to the idea that Camus is probably most associated with. ''To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still.''

Reading this absorbing biography, one is struck by how well those famous words apply to the life of their author.

Photo: Albert Camus, seen in 1948, ''refused politics without morality.'' (The New York Times)